


They Burned the Library of Alexandria Again and I Had to Stick My Porn Somewhere

by proxydialogue



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Ficlet Collection, Fluff, Gen, M/M, The Great Tumblr Exodus, old fic, philosophical musings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 08:23:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 6,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16869505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proxydialogue/pseuds/proxydialogue
Summary: The saved lithographs of Supernatural tumblr ficlets from over the years, here preserved evermore since tumblr is singing its swan song.I'll do my best to update the tags as I go. Each chapter is a different ficlet, which I will also attempt to label in as informational a way as possible. The Rating and warnings reflect what the most graphic of the ficlets contain, but not necessarily the rating of every ficlet included.The title is rather misleading I'm afraid, very little porn to be found here. I can only hope to atone for that in the future.Alternatively titled: Good Grief, So That's Where My Early Twenties Went.





	1. God Reflects On His Three Musketeers

Dean Winchester has never been able to get a grip on the idea of corruption. He’s an optimist, you know, underneath all that self-sacrificial metal and denim. He thinks that the people he loves are made of golden apple cores deep, deep down, and that time and constant forgiveness are enough to dig that wholesomeness out into the bright sunshiny day, where it can grow up tall to be a human. 

The only person that’s ever been true of is Dean, himself. Sam has got a permanent crack split through the middle of him, and despite his very best good intentions, the darkness he has in there is a mouth wide enough to swallow a yellow afternoon. Bobby’s never been entirely the shape of the rest of his species, and it’s not only his intelligence that sets him apart. His soul is like a poker game where the cards have been stacked with heroism and cold blooded murder. Kevin…Kevin is a victim, as was intended he should be. That is how all my prophets are: empty, passive, upright wine glasses, waiting to be filled. Kevin will always be strong, always be good, but he’ll never win his fights. 

Cas does not even have humanity. Cas is inertia. Ions in the atmosphere. Crackling white light in the sky and fires on the ground. 

The thing about my angels is that I built them with bodies to live almost forever, and minds to conceive of the passing of time. And to keep them alive, I had to balance the disjunction.

Nothing can exist in a single state very long without self-destructing. So I had to make the angels variable, I had to put everything into them so that they could be everything, and persist. I put in the light of Eden, the dark of creation, and the ruthless heart of all the empty spaces in between in this universe. They’re not evil. But they are states of nature. They are filled to the brim with motion and collision and impunity. 

But when Dean looks at Cas he sees a friend who has made bad decisions. He sees a person (and that is the root of Dean’s grief; because of course Cas isn’t a person at all) who needs support and guidance. Dean looks at Cas and instead of seeing a natural disaster in motion he sees blue eyes and confusion. 

And Cas, my poor, poor child, sees what Dean is seeing, and tries to remake himself in that image. 

It’s more like an unmaking, really. And it will either save him (in a sense, for belief shapes reality) or it will bury him. I can’t stop it. And I wouldn’t even if I could. 

Because, shamefully, I am an optimist myself. 

It is Dean bottomless capacity for naive misunderstanding that makes him one of my favorites. One of my more beautiful mistakes. No matter how many times his brothers and his lovers, his fathers and his friends, disappoint him, he will go on believing they are capable of more. 

I did not make man in my image. I am too vast, too cruel, too unaccountable a thing to squeeze into a mortal casket. But I do wish sometimes, for the betterment of all this small existence, that they had made me in theirs.


	2. The Voice Says I'm Almost Out of Minutes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> part meta, part fic

I always worry that Ben Edlund is gonna decide to bring this line back by doing that thing he does where he writes something so hilarious we don’t even see the tragedy coming. 

Like, in his purest form, Cas is technically a wave of energies. What if somebody traps him in a radio with dying batteries or something, and the only way to keep him going is to plug it into the wall. But the bunker is old. And sometimes the power goes out. And every time it comes back on the voice in the radio is farther away. And Dean’s too afraid to ask, so someday when he’s out Sam sits at the dining room table with cassettes, recording all his last conversations with Castiel in the hopes that preserving his words can somehow mean preserving the being inside. And Sam asks: 

"Cas, when the power goes out, where do you go?" 

"Nowhere. Some place dark…It’s never quiet there." 

"What does it sound like?" 

"Voices. Old records. Some of them are just singing the last lines to songs over and over again. Some of them are like the voices of my old phone. It’s a big, empty place. They’re just echoes that won’t die out." 

Sam is quiet for a second. The cassette is still recording. He thinks maybe his instincts were wrong on this one. He thinks maybe this desperate action of his is no better than trying to scoop up the moon’s reflection in a bowl of water and praying it will still be there when the sun rises.

"What do you say when you’re there? Can you remember?"

"Yes. I say; I am the one who gripped you tight, and raised you from perdition."

“Is that all?" 

"No. Sometimes I ask for forgiveness." 

Sam keeps the recordings. And on Sundays, years later, he finds Dean sitting at the table with his coffee and his newspaper clippings, listening to the old echoes Sam caught on tape.


	3. The House is the Last Thing Standing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [image of an old farmhouse in the fog. condemned.]

The house is the last thing standing at the very edge of the world. (And perhaps at the edge of every world, but we can only be certain of this one.) Beyond it, there is nothing. Just the howling white static of creation swallowing itself, which whirls and sinks like slow moving fog. Before the house are empty streets and empty cities, empty graves beneath the crumbled stones of archaic markings for the dead. Shells left over from a civilization stopped in its tracks. 

The souls of the world moved on. 

The house still stands. 

When even the empty things are broken down and redistributed into the cosmos, to some other self-important clock around some other star, the house will keep standing. She is waiting. The rotted boards and worn out shingles are awake. The open, hollow windows are looking out to the unused roads and the meaningless symbols and signs. To the traffic lights that flash and change, red, green, yellow, like tiny, individual sunrises scattered across the continent. 

Before the end came, an angel stood at the steps to her door. He lay his wide gaze upon her foundation and her stones, and named her Home. He named her with his Father’s voice, that same which named the night and the day. And now she knows herself. 

She can speak her own name, when her floorboards groan, when the wind worms through her insulation. In the storms, she can sing. 

On the morning her angel left, two brothers left with him. They were also called Home. She was named for them. “Wait for us," they said. 

Red. Green. Yellow. 

Morning. And morning again. 

Her open door creaks in the breeze, like an old mother’s bones.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [image of lights on a foggy street. they could be street lamps. they could be anything else too.]

Just before the end comes, the fireflies disappear. They are last seen…everywhere. In the frigid deserts of Russia. Over the ocean. Climbing out of mine shafts in Mexico. Struggling above the streetlights in New York. 

Then they freeze to death. They drown. Asphyxiate. Paint the windshields of cars. 

And the sun never comes up again. 

Afterwards, fearsome creatures of fire (bright as the sun once was) descend. Or rise? And float, burning, through the dark streets. They are silent and roiling. Curious. 

Almost innocent, in the wandering, unhurried paths they take.

They touch nothing. Just move through the world, like…

well, like fireflies. Harmless lights, trapped in a jar, still searching for the sky.


	5. The Trench Coat

is haunted.

Of course it is. All that blood spilled on the fabric. The stains left over from when it was carried to hell, and heaven, and purgatory by a divine being. The lake water and tears and stardust soaked up into the seams.

It was held together and repaired by the will of its host. And now it’s a nexus of stalled energies and broken breath. It’s a graveyard. 

Castiel the angel never noticed the whispers. But Cas the human hears them all the time. 

He wears the coat anyway. Because it’s a part of him. And he comes to understand a lot about futility and desperation. 

He won’t take it hunting, it’s too much of a distraction. But everywhere else he goes, the coat goes with him. He starts taking long walks just to listen. Wearing it even on hot summer days. He carries around his weight in specters; restless spirits curled up in the pockets. They are the people he killed, the demons he slew, and the people he couldn’t save. 

And one ghost who can’t remember its name. Who sleeps in the breast pocket, close to the thumping of Cas’ heart. 

The other ghosts want to talk about grief and revenge. They go on and on and on about pain and darkness, or how much they miss the sensation of dreaming. 

The breast pocket ghost only wants to talk about astronomy. “The north star isn’t the brightest star in the sky, you know," he says. “Sirius is." 

"I didn’t know that," Cas replies softly. Sadly. Dry dirt road crunches under his feet. 

"It’s in the constellation Canis Major," says the ghost. Then there is almost quiet for a while, as Cas walks and the breast pocket ghost hums. This is the only time the other spirits stop their clammer. They won’t speak over this ghost. Cas can’t tell if it’s out of respect, or just because they fear him. “Have I ever told you what comets are like?" the ghost asks after a minute. 

"Yes," answers Cas. His voice breaks only a little. “But please tell me again."


	6. Truce

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [a picture of the author's bloody knuckles. hand holding a coffee cup. resting on the open pages of a book.]
> 
> 8.23 Coda.

Dean lives the kind of life that’s hard on the knuckles, and he’s okay with that.  

Always punch back. Never stay down. Kick ‘em before they get too close…

That’s how he does everything. Hell, it’s how he gets out of bed in the morning. Fists up; swing at the sun.

And seriously, he’s okay with that. It means he’s always tired. It means he’s always bloody. But that’s just the way it’s always been, so he doesn’t mind. Except for right now. Right now he feels kinda stupid about it, because Cas is standing three feet away with his blue eyes and his soft mouth and his bad posture, _watching_ Dean go to war.

And all Dean’s doing is shelling peas.

Dean can tell from the way Cas is standing that he’s trying to psych himself up into saying something. It’s like he’s put down roots in the kitchen floor, and his hands are all bunched up in the front of his t-shirt, stretching out the cotton. It takes a long time, these days, for Cas to find his voice. Dean doesn’t really know what’s going on with that, but he suspects it’s a little bit the bad guy’s fault and a lotta bit his fault.

Which is…well it sucks. But even he finds it hard to draw a clear line between himself and the monsters anymore, so he doesn’t push it.

He splits a fat green pod. It pops and cracks under his fingers. He dumps the peas into a white bowl, chucks the shell, picks up another.

Split. Crack. Split. Crack.

He thinks about purgatory, snarling vampires and the butt of his knife crashing into their frontal lobes.

Cas says, “Dean.”  And Dean hasn’t said a goddamn thing, hasn’t even looked up from his peas yet, but Cas already sounds exasperated. “Will you let me help?”

Dean’s hands pause. He thinks about saying “No, I got it,”—kick ‘em before they get too close. He thinks about calling Cas on his own bullshit, “You mean the way you helped Sam? Or the way you helped Metatron?” He thinks about not saying anything, because Cas isn’t the only one who’s having trouble seeing his friends for friends…

He digs into the plastic bag on the counter and shoves a handful of peas at Cas. Pushes the white bowl between them. “Sure,” he mumbles.

Cas moves next to him. He smells like fabric softener (Sam’s doing) and sawdust (who fucking knows?). Dean goes back to war. Cas just shells some peas.

Dean hums _The Four Horseman_ under his breath and tries to act normal.

“Why do you refuse to talk to me?” Cas asks suddenly, hard and upset. Like he thinks he can ambush Dean into giving him an honest answer.

_Always punch back._

“Nothing to say,” Dean bites out. He mangles a pod and eats it instead of throwing it away.

Cas takes the hit lying down. Same way he always does. A deep sigh and a nod.

“Of course,” he says.

Dean figures that’s gonna be it. They’re gonna finish these fucking peas and then Cas is gonna go hide somewhere and Dean will sit through another lecture from Sam about misdirected anger and Dean’s irrational fear of emasculation. Which is not even the fucking issue. Dean isn’t worried about people thinking he’s queer. He’s not even worried about being queer. There are a lotta people in the world banging on about how much God hates the gays and he doesn’t really think it’s true, but pissing God off is pretty much Dean’s favorite hobby. So if fucking a guy with a smoker’s rasp and baby blue eyes is what’s gonna do the trick, then hell, Dean is putting out.

That’s not what his problem his.

His problem is that every time he tries to let Cas in, he rediscovers all the places where they don’t fit perfectly together. They’re small places, but they’re sharp, and they rub like sandpaper, and Dean is used to being bruised but he doesn’t really like the idea of someone knocking him around from the inside.

He tries to go back to humming. The song has left him.

“What will you do if I never get my grace back?” Cas asks. Another attack. Dean chucks his fucking peas down and rounds on Cas—

Who won’t look at him. He’s holding onto the counter, white knuckled, waiting for Dean to mow him down at the knees.

Dean doesn’t swing. He just barely doesn’t swing. It takes everything he’s got. “I don’t know,” he answers.

Cas clears his throat and shifts his weight a little, breaks his anchor.

“What if I do get my grace back?” he asks.

It suddenly occurs to Dean that Cas doesn’t know shit about being mortal. He’s been dead a couple of times, and human for about half a second, but his only real experience of mortality is the one he’s seen Dean scream his way through.

 _Stay down,_ Dean thinks. _Stay down._

Cas looks up at him. It’s like a knife at Dean’s throat. Gun at his gut. Long, long drop at his back.

“I don’t know,” Dean says.

Cas nods and sort of hugs himself, a gesture he’s only picked up recently. Dean wonders if he used to do that with his wings.

“Me either,” Cas says. And those aren’t exactly fighting words.

Dean wraps an arm around Cas’ shoulder and calls a cease fire on the peas.


	7. What is Love?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [picture of an empty bed. sheets ruffled.]

Sam had never heard (or read) a definition of love that didn’t bore him to tears.

Of course he still wanted love, who didn’t? He wanted better insight into all those stupid clichés and contradictory absolutes. He wanted to say the kind of embarrassing shit at three o’clock in the morning that made him feel like a made for TV movie. And though he’d had a taste of those things, brief and bloody like everything in his life, there wasn’t any part of him that thought it was enough.

Sam didn’t have a whole lot of faith in words. However inspired the phrasing, Sam had never come across a writer who had managed to say more than: Ouch, love. Two thousand years and forty generations of geniuses, and not one of them had come up with a description that made sense to him. Not Chaucer: _the life so brief, the art so long in the learning_ , not Shakespeare: _bears out even to the edge of doom_ , not Byron: _a spark of that immortal fire with angels shared_ , and not Nicholas fucking Sparks: _more than there are stars in the sky and fish in the sea._

So Sam was really, really fucking surprised when it was Dean (Dean, who wouldn’t know an iamb if it crawled up his ass and bit him in the kidney) who put all of Sam’s doubts about love to rest.

They were just sitting quietly at the table together, reading, when out of the blue Dean said: “So Cas stole my pillow case.”

Which was the stupidest thing Sam had ever heard, even stupider that Dean was bothering to bring it up at all. Sam opened his mouth to say so and then stopped, because Dean was still staring at his book, his arms crossed tight across his chest like he was trying to keep something from showing on his face.

So instead, Sam asked, “Are you ever going to tell him?”

At first he thought Dean was going to pretend he hadn’t heard. The obvious, unspoken answer was “No, of course I’m fucking not. I’m a Winchester. We don’t talk about love, we just die for it.” But then Dean shrugged without looking up. Shook his head after that. Shrugged again, and mumbled, “Pretty sure he knows.”

And that was the stupidest thing Sam had ever heard.

“How could he know?” Sam asked. How could anyone but Sam know, when all Dean did was push the guy away? Call him heartless and childish. Refuse to look at him, refuse to talk to him. Stomp around the house muttering about Brutus and Caesar all day. How could anybody translate that as love?

Dean looked up at Sam like he was the crazy one.

“Dude,” said Dean. “He betrayed me. He broke the fuck’n world. He blew up Heaven. And instead of shanking his ass, I make him dinner every night.” Dean paused. “Besides, why else would he think he could STEAL MY FAVORITE SILK PILLOW CASE AND LIVE TO TELL THE TALE.” Sam jumped as Dean twisted in his seat suddenly to shout in the direction of the hallway.

“IT’S HARDLY A HEIST WORTH RECOUNTING,” Cas shouted back from somewhere else in the bunker.

“Asshole,” Dean muttered under his breath. But he was smiling.

Sam closed his book and looked at his brother, who was already reading again. Like he hadn’t just somehow, in his own broken language, answered the world’s most unanswerable question.

_What is love?_

_Love is when he hurts me in ways I’ll never get over. And still I ask him to come home._


	8. The Angels Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [dead husks of thistles in the sun]

The angels fall for days. An entire population plummeting to the dirt as a silent rain of light. 

The four of them have nowhere to go next. So they look out the windows of the bunker, watching the sky. Kevin sets to decoding the rest of the angel tablet. The poor kid is a scarecrow made of pencil shavings. Sam sets to making a more comprehensive filing system and documenting everything he and Dean know that the Men of Letters didn’t. He cross-references over coffee and reads all the local papers over lunch. 

Dean cooks and spends a lot of time at The Christmas Tree shop. Getting frames and lamps and bath mats. He also spends a lot of time drinking. 

Cas…

Cas sits outside most days and studies the same patch of weeds. 

“Some buddhists say you could spend an entire year studying a single flower, and still never know the flower.” He says when Dean comes out with a couple of beers and sits next to him. 

“Pretty cagey flower,” Dean says and hands over the bottle. Cas takes it but he doesn’t drink. 

The weeds stir in a light breeze. It hasn’t rained in days and they look like they might be dying. 

“Every child born this year will be an angel.” Cas says after a minute. “None of them will know themselves.” 

Dean doesn’t say anything. He lets his fingers go numb around the cold glass and he waits. Cas inhales. Dean hears the stutter in his lungs. 

“There are only two of us left in the universe who remember the history of Heaven,” Cas says. He lets the bottle slip to ground. “Metatron believes…I don’t know what he believes. That the play is the thing, I suppose.” 

“Did you just make a Shakespeare reference?” 

“Heaven is gone,” Cas snaps, looking up at him. “One third of creation, do you understand? It is gone, and my brothers and sisters are gone. And I am the last person alive with enough heart to care, because Metatron certainly doesn’t. I am the last—” Cas breaks off suddenly, tears in his eyes. He shakes his head and leans over his stomach. “I am not even that,” he whispers. 

Sobs, actually. But Dean will never make himself believe it. 

He tosses his beer into the weeds and puts his arms around his friend. Cas has never understood the way human intimacy works, but he’s always had a firm handle on grief. He buries his face in Dean’s shoulder and clutches his hands at Dean’s waist. 

And okay, he cries. 

Dean would like to be the bigger man here. But what he would like more is for one goddamn person he cares about to catch a fucking break already.

So he just holds on and makes sure Cas doesn’t slip into the broken glass of the beer bottle.


	9. The Fable of The Killing Man and The Angel Who Became God

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [a road through the woods. blood red with fall.]

A story from the first world. From the days of Christianity and Innovation. When the paved roads were still unbuckled and the cars still ran. From the days of faith. And stars in the sky. 

A fairytale, if you will. Or a fable. Since there’s probably a lesson to be learned. 

Once there was a man whose job it was to save the world. He was the second kind of martyr. Not like Jesus, who the stories say died for the world. It was this guy’s job to keep living for it. 

He must have been murdered ten or twelve times. But his feet kept coming back to the crust and the dirt. And he kept walking those paved roads and climbing those impossible mountains. He kept nailing himself up on those metaphorical crosses, and throwing himself in front of beasts and buses, and every time he did, the angels brought him back. 

He was a bad dude, this guy; the second kind of martyr. His heart was all carbonized and black. And he liked killing. 

He was a martyr of the kind of world that had bombs and guns and kids dying homeless in stone cities like giant graveyards.

Anyway, an angel fell in love with him. And that was sort of the beginning of the end. 

There was this disease that coal miners got in the first world. It was called black lung. They went down into those unlit shafts of damp and shadow, and the coal dust and the black mold got into their lungs and coated them in filth. And then their lungs started dying before their bodies did, turning gray and hard. They rotted from the inside out. 

That’s what this angel’s love was like. He fell down into that black carbon heart and the rot got inside him. 

The thing about a rotted love is that it still feels like a good love. Like a right love. So this angel, he thought he was doing good. When he worked together with this man, he thought he was stomping out evil and purifying the world and Heaven together. 

This angel became the second kind of God. Not like Yahweh, who made the world in seven days and sat back to watch it spin. It was this God’s job to set things on fire. 

Maybe that’s an extreme way of saying it. Maybe it wasn’t his job. But that’s what he did. 

Sometime in the twenty first century, the man went missing. Him and his killing, black heart walked south, down into the desert and no one ever heard from him again. And he must have eaten his own soul and digested it or something, because he never ended up in Heaven  _or_  Hell. He was just gone. 

That poor, love-sick God came down looking for his martyr. And when he couldn’t find him. He burned the world down. 

That’s it. 

Okay, so I lied. It’s not really a fairytale.

It’s just history. 

But my little girl, she asked me the other day why the all the trees are red and the skies black like coal dust. And I didn’t want to tell her: ”Baby girl, the world is  _still_  burning down.” 

So I told it to her like a love story. And then I put her to bed.


	10. Coming Up on the End

\- 2014 -

Coming up on the end, there's a bleak sky that follows every man who goes on his own road to die. It stretches from horizon to horizon like the vapor trails of new ghosts—headless, heartless, homeless, bleeding away their regrets until they're dry. After that there's a sunset that drags the curtain down, burns the last restless hauntings out of the world, and brings on the night. Wind will rattle bones in the gutters.

In the last fifteen minutes of an awkward, silent drive, Cas turns to look at Dean. The bleak sky is following them too, and though he’s just a busted up angel, not a man, Cas still knows what road this is. But Dean, this Dean, five years younger than the days they're living in, is only along for the ride.

Dean catches him looking and lets his head fall back against the seat. He looks exhausted. Cas sighs and gives him a grim, opiate smile.

It's good that he's high, he thinks. Words in this clumsy human language have always been a painful ordeal.

Cas says: "Dean," to make sure his passenger is listening. Then he turns his eyes back to the road. It will be easier to say what he wants to if he’s watching where he's going, seeing the place he’s about to end up.

Dean hums. His hand is open on the seat between them, fingernails scratching at the canvas.

Cas says: "It's not that we—angels I mean, don't—um. We have the same experience of loss and—Jesus fucking—,"He takes a breath and reminds himself that this isn’t technically a betrayal. And even if it is, nothing will come of it in _this_ world. "It took me a long time to understand why you piss me off so much,” he says, and that seems to be true.

"What?" Dean's hand almost lifts off the seat.

"No one ever explained to me that love was going to feel like a bad stomach surgery, Dean. I had no way of recognizing it. I thought I...every conversation with you was like an attack I couldn't defend myself against." He stops and giggles suddenly. He can’t help himself. But he doesn’t feel the hysteria; it’s just this altered body, winding down."It still feels that way," he admits through his laughter.

Dean's hand retreats to his lap. He’s quiet. Cas clears his throat and the laughter leaves. He tries to finish the thought before it escapes him.

 "When you see me— _him_ again, he won't know why looking you in the eye makes him feel burned and hopeless. He won’t—if you guys save the world somehow, if by some miracle you survive—he'll fuck up. He'll try to leave and he'll come back and everything he does will be wrong. But he’ll think he’s doing right. He’ll think he’s helping, or proving himself…If you get the chance, tell him why it hurts. Tell him what it is." There’s more to say but he’s lost it. Cas looks over and Dean is staring out the window. Oh well.

He lets it go.

The road curves with the surface of the earth. The bleak sky trails behind. There’s a phantom- itch across the front of Cas’ throat where his body is trying to remember something that hasn't happened yet.

Cas hears the stutter in Dean’s throat five minutes later. The way he almost doesn’t say anything at all. Then:

“What if I can’t give him what he needs?”

Now that Cas wants to laugh he can’t. Instead he inhales through his mouth and squints against the sting in his eyes. Dean will never stop surprising him.

“He won’t expect you to,” he says kindly. He grips the steering wheel and follows the road and tries not to keep glancing over. He thinks the Percocet must be wearing off, the ache in his chest is like a broken drum.

\- 2013 -

Coming up on the end, and the asshole drops by one last time. He brings pie with him, but he doesn’t draw attention to it. Just puts it down on the table and stands in the room with his eyes on Dean like he’s waiting for forgiveness or benediction or a fucking a musical number to begin.

The trials, and yeah Dean heard about that shit-show through the grapevine, have been taking their toll. Cas is pale and unsteady. His blue eyes look gray.

He clears his throat and says: “I just came to tell you—,”

Then he stops. And he doesn’t say anything at all. Dean is about to roll his eyes and tell him to fuck off when Cas sits down in a chair and puts his face in his hands.

“I don’t know,” he says miserably. “It always hurts with you.” Dean’s stomach turns over. Somewhere in his past he had a conversation about this.

Suddenly there they are driving down a long bleak road with ghosts in the smoke of their exhaust. Suddenly it’s the end already. And Dean is still stomping around in righteous anger like he’s the only sinner who made it out of hell.

Dean pulls up a chair. He sits in front of Cas so that they’re knee to knee and stares at the scars on his knuckles.

Sam is sleeping in his room; same place he’s been for two days. He looks like shit on a stick and Dean feels like a carbonized turd, Cas looks like an addict on the ass end of a bad bender and Dean wonders how many times  they’ve ended up here? In how many worlds did God let them get this far?

He wants to look Cas in the eye and say _It’s love, you goddamn jackass,_ but he can’t. So instead he reaches out and puts his palm on the side of the idiot’s face. He pulls Cas forward and leans out to meet him, and just before they’re too close he hesitates.

“Just so you know, this isn’t me forgiving you,” he whispers. “This is about something else.”

And then he kisses Cas. Just lays a big freaking gay-ass kiss right on that backstabbing motherfucker’s lips. And then he almost falls out of the chair when the asshole kisses him back.

It’s a little annoying, actually. It pisses Dean off, to know how much it wasn’t just Cas who wanted this. How it’s been screaming inside of Dean too.

Cas has his hands on Dean’s shoulder and on his neck, slipping around to the back of his head. He’s a pushy little bastard, barging forward with his tongue to make space for himself in Dean’s mouth, in his chest, in his heart. And then he’s pulling away, leaving Dean with no explanation and an empty space, the same way he always does.

But he’s still holding on.

 “What’s the last trial, Cas?” Dean asks before he can remember he’s not supposed to give a shit. Cas shakes his head.

“Dean, I—”

“ _What’s the last trial._ ”

Now Cas lets go. His eyes don’t look gray at all, they look like fresh bruises. His mouth looks like he wants to laugh. His hands look like he wants to cry. They hover in front of Cas’ chest like a shield.

“I’ll come back if I can,” Cas says.

Dean swallows his bitter retorts.

“You always do.”  


	11. A Good Mother

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [a mother's day card]

It's one of those things they don't talk about. 

There is also, maybe, a little bit of a chance that Sammy doesn't remember it (Dean hopes he doesn't remember it. Sam was five, and Dean shouted at him about it for three days. Thinking about it still makes him flinch). 

In his first year of school Sam Winchester learned three things. 

1) People can be monsters too. 

2) Winnie the Pooh is God. 

3) Everybody has a mom. 

They never celebrated Father's Day. For one thing, Dean could never seem to remember when it was coming up, and for another, John was somehow never, ever, not once, home on that day. 

But Sam went to school and he got himself some knowledge and used it to deduce that if John was definitely dad, then Dean must be mom. It wasn't that Sam didn't understand that Dean was his brother. It was that Sam's understanding of moms stemmed from Hallmark movies and Clorox commercials. 

Moms give hugs. And moms sit with you after your nightmares (real or imagined) scare you so bad you can't sleep anymore. Moms know where the Band-Aids are. Moms know when it's time for bigger shoes. And Moms yell at you when you've torn a hole in your new jeans. 

So one Sunday in May, Dean Winchester received his first and only Mother's Day card. Sam's name was written inside with different colored crayons, along with a misspelled message about how Sam appreciate the way Dean took such good care of him. Even if most of the time he was "shity" about it. 

Dean was eleven. And it hurt more than a punch in the nuts. 

He screamed at Sam until he was hoarse. He smashed two mugs against the wall and broke the air-conditioner with his foot. And then he went outside and sat behind the motel, still clutching the card, and cried until he gave himself a headache. 

In recent years (having been both dead, resurrected, and a chess piece in his own past) Dean has starting thinking that maybe it wasn't such a stupid thing for Sam to believe. Dean didn't get pissed because Sam thought Dean was a mom and by association girly. He got pissed because Sam _thought_   _he had a mom,_ and that was something Dean could never have again. 

Dean still has the card. He kept it through everything, through the apocalypse and Sam's campaign to save the world and his own petition for angelic suicide, because it's the only piece of evidence he has that maybe he wasn't always such a fuck-up. 

He takes it out sometimes, when Sam is asleep or not around, and looks at it.

He hopes he was a good mom. 

Or an alright one, at least. 


	12. Eternity

People think that death is an ending. Since that's always where stories end. It's where memories end. It's where loved ones gets buried in cold, morning dirt. And then there's Death himself, whose personal visits almost always mean the end of the road. 

But for Cas, death has always been the beginning. His own death. Which began with Dean's death. Which began with Sam's death. And on back through the family with John and Mary and the Campbell's...

He thought, for a time, that he was cursed. Or perhaps that he was being punished for his sins. 

He has since come to understand that his struggles signify only a name. 

 _Winchester._  

Winchester's live backwards. When they die, instead of leaving the world, they worm into it, creating change from the inside out. And from there they move forward, and the world goes with them. The shadows bend around their footsteps. The light casts where their shadows fall. Fate unravels and is re-spun. 

Creation and Destruction go with them everywhere. 

Though, being mortals, death is all that Sam and Dean notice. 

Cas is a Winchester. The shade and the fire follow him too. 

...

There is a story about how Time in the world began.

It was with two lovers. Who died and crossed back over the black river for each other. And one was light and one was dark, and together they rebelled against the clockwork of destiny. 

Their lives were circles. They lived for love. They died for love. They lived again. Sometimes they died together. And sometimes they died alone. 

And those lovers, whoever they were, became buried deep in the roots of the world. Until the momentum of their actions caused the globe to spin. And where one lover went the other followed. 

And life. 

And death. 

And so from the Beginning until--

yes

until the End. 

...

But of course time is not linear. And actions of the future affect events of the past. And a force on a globe can cause the globe to spin from anywhere. A force on a cyclical history can cause the cycle to spin from any time. 

The leaves grow brown and wither on the trees as Castiel walks, barefoot, down the road. He suspects that he is darkness. 

It doesn't matter if he is following Dean or Dean is following him. These maples and pines and fields will be renewed when the green-eyed man passes through. As he inevitably will. 

This one road is all roads. 

And Cas is alive again. And it's because he's in love. 


	13. A House Where You're Not Welcome Anymore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Old white farmhouse, with doors painted red.]

He finds himself outside a house he’d thought he left behind. The driveway is a long black river (so dark it will not reflect the stars), the mailbox is a yawning white lion that looks at him disinterestedly and then goes back to sleep. The stairs are plain, gray stone.

The door is red. But he knows that is for his eyes alone. Others will see black, or white, and they will walk the river and climb the stairs and enter, and a father will be waiting for them there. Inside the house it is warm and poorly lit. The shadows are soft and everywhere, and the chairs are never in the same place twice. The windows, which look like glass from the end of the driveway, are actually made of time, and unless it is raining (in which case the house is loud with gunshots and sword-clashes and thin wet blood spills over the windowsills), they show the peaceful epilogues of man’s histories.

Those who leave the house will have no memory of ever having come at all. But they will feel faith again, they will feel new. That is the nature of this place. And that is the nature of so dull a door.

Castiel will leave, and he will remember all of it. It will be stamped like a return address on the bottom of his heart. Angels serve in Heaven as soldiers, never knowing they've had a home, but humans spent half their lives sick with nostalgia for the places they began (or so sick with fear that they never stop running away). 

Castiel will never be able to find his way back here. 

This is the house of the Lord. And he is not welcome anymore. 


End file.
